Some context

Also, compared to previous HD displays using the same tech, it doesn’t suffer from visible grain or texture anymore when displaying non-bright pixels, and the luminance is also a lot more homogeneous which indicates new methods are used during its fabrication.

Super AMOLED color rendering accuracy and consistency across multiple samples always has been a huge difficulty for Samsung because of weak factory calibration process and possibly unstable materials.
I’ve been delight noticing with Galaxy S III, a lot of great work has been done by their engineers on this: consistency between devices seems improved (I’ll need more data here to really talk about that) and factory calibration seems good.

If the “panels” engineers did huge progress this time, there’s still a lot to critic about what have been done probably by another team, who turned every knobs like

Display sharpness

Color saturation

Response curve in shadows

…to the red zone, when, you know, it becomes “too much”.

Measurements

So.. where should we look at in those graphs?

First, there’s an issue with shadows, it should be noticeable in the luminance graph right?But.. nope, it’s not visible this way. Let’s switch to another view with the gamma graph:Issue spotted! Lets investigate a little more with near black measurements:Leaving no doubt, the color profile attached to the display is mis-configured in its shadow part: the curves should follow the dotted one.

The answer

Galaxy S III (let me precise one more time: GT-I9300 version) is indeed not calibrated properly. US Galaxy S III have are calibrated differently.
There’s no real point saying its hardware or software related because it’s a driver mis-configuration. So the result is about the same. I mean: some display hardware with issues could be corrected by applying a color profile calibration.

However let’s be clear: there’s should be nothing wrong with the hardware except if you got unlucky and in this case I recommend an exchange.

The issue is fixed in Display Expert prototype, and it has no side effect whatsoever.
So.. you’ll see more about that later.